Tag: Startups

I despise robodialers and their political masters who exempt themselves from the popular Do Not Call legislation. At one point in these pages I dreamed of retaliating in kind against those who wield them:

Retaliate in kind – I could imagine a new service that lets you sic your own robodialer on the people who were nice enough to target you. Surely the irritation could motivate some small transaction fee. You could choose from a standard set of (long-winded) messages or record your own.

Now a startup is promising to let you “communicate with politicians the way they prefer to communicate with you: Robocalls.” I look forward to seeing whether ReverseRobocall can bring us to a state of robodialer Mutually Assured Destruction and deter politicians and their pollster lapdogs from their ongoing acts of telephonic aggression. You can sign up for the beta here.

Hopefully there is an API (presumably it is built on Twilio) so I can automate my 100 to 1 retaliatory policy (and the multiplier goes up for negative ads or particularly chipper politicians). If the politicians change the law so robodialers can call our mobile numbers, we’ll need to crowdsource the mobile numbers of the political establishment to ensure they receive a fully symmetrical experience. In the end, I suppose, it turns into a daily deals operation like everything else, with the politicians in the merchant role. Conspiracy theorists might even suspect politicians are behind the site, using their own despicable behavior as a surefire way to build up their email list as they recognize the inexorable decline of landline phones.